


to a hero

by imposterhuman



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst, Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Compliant, Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Spoilers, BAMF Natasha Romanov, BAMF Tony Stark, Character Study, F/M, Gen, Gen or Slash, Kinda, Natasha Romanov & Tony Stark Friendship, Natasha Romanov Feels, Natasha Romanov Has Issues, Natasha Romanov Is Not A Robot, Natasha Romanov Needs a Hug, Natasha Romanov has a heart, POV Natasha Romanov, Tony Feels, Tony Stark Has A Heart, Tonynat, You Decide, my goodbye and thank you to my queen natasha
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-24
Updated: 2019-06-24
Packaged: 2020-05-18 19:22:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,578
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19341001
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/imposterhuman/pseuds/imposterhuman
Summary: Natasha, above all else, is good at her job. She is a killer, yes, but she is thebestkiller. She can accurately pinpoint a weakness from ten feet away and strike, she can get up close and personal and deliver an undetectable poison. She can watch, can evaluate potential assets and liabilities with the most coldly professional detachment. She never gets attached, because attachment is weakness, and Natasha Romanov is not weak.She sees herself in her newest mark, though, as he tries to burn brightly one last time before he goes out. She sees Natalia, just free of the Red Room and drunk on the idea of a freedom so out of reach, in his eyes, in the way he fights tooth and nail even though he knows it's hopeless, in his special brand of ruthlessness from which she is not spared. She tries not to; empathy gets people like her killed. Clint was a special case. Stark will not-can not- be.Natasha tells herself she feels nothing when she completes her mission. But Stark has wormed his way under her defenses (I would do whatever I wanted to do, with whomever I wanted to do it with) and she cannot let that stand.





	to a hero

**Author's Note:**

> i was in a weird place when i wrote this so im not really sure what it is rip but its been sitting in my drafts forever so im just,,, posting it i guess
> 
> we deserved more tonynat and thats that
> 
> enjoy!

Natasha, above all else, is good at her job. She is a killer, yes, but she is the  _ best  _ killer. She can accurately pinpoint a weakness from ten feet away and strike, she can get up close and personal and deliver an undetectable poison. She can watch, can evaluate potential assets and liabilities with the most coldly professional detachment. She never gets attached, because attachment is weakness, and Natasha Romanov is not weak. 

 

She sees herself in her newest mark, though, as he tries to burn brightly one last time before he goes out. She sees Natalia, just free of the Red Room and drunk on the idea of a freedom so out of reach, in his eyes, in the way he fights tooth and nail even though he knows it’s hopeless, in his special brand of ruthlessness from which she is not spared. She tries not to; empathy gets people like her killed. Clint was a special case. Stark will not-  _ can not _ \- be. 

 

Natasha tells herself she feels nothing when she completes her mission. But Stark has wormed his way under her defenses ( _ I would do whatever I wanted to do, with whomever I wanted to do it with _ ) and she cannot let that stand.

 

_ Tony Stark: not recommended. _

 

(It’s more than that, though. She is a Black Widow; emotions do not control her. Stark, decidedly, is not. And nothing motivates him more than spite, a desire to prove people, to prove  _ her _ , wrong. So she gives him spite, as much as she wants him to stay far away, him with his eyes that see to much and his brain that works too fast. He is a threat to her, to her walls and her masks, and she wants him gone, but the world needs him. So she doesn’t recommend him for the initiative that he is required for, she lets her judgement be his motivation.

 

And he proves her wrong, like she knew he would.)

 

She ends up in his Tower ( _ in the lion’s den _ , she thinks wryly) somehow, with the rest of the cobbled together “heroes” who make up the Avengers. 

 

(Natasha knows that she is no hero, but she is an Avenger. It should be enough. Sometimes, it isn’t.)

 

He finds her, one night, with a drink in hand and in ratty clothing. He isn’t Iron Man then, just Tony Stark. She isn’t the Black Widow, either, but she’s not Natasha Romanov. She doesn’t know who she is when he sits next to her, when he wordlessly offers her a drink and she wordlessly accepts. She trusts him enough to know that he won’t poison her. She wouldn’t poison him either.

 

“Rough night?” he asks finally. 

 

Her face, she knows, betrays nothing. “Something like that,” she admits. It’s more than she would’ve a month ago, and she knows Tony knows it. She is making an effort, with this team, to trust. So as much as the words tear up her throat, she says them.

 

“You did good today,” he offers. ”You saved the whole block of civilians.”

 

“You could’ve,” she says, purposefully nonchalant. “But you dropped me there. Why?”

 

He shrugs, not bothering to put on a mask. Even without one, he is unreadable. Every movement, every breath, is deliberate, even when he isn’t trying. “You needed the push,” he says quietly. 

 

“I don’t know what that means,” says Natasha, even though she does. She wants to hear it from his mouth, not his eyes.

 

“Yes, you do,” he says, quirking his lips. “But fine, I’ll play ball. You needed to realize that you’re a hero.”

 

She nearly flinches. That wasn’t what she expected him to say. “I already knew that,” she says haughtily. “Not everyone has your desperate need for validation.”

 

“Did you?” Tony arches an eyebrow, ignoring her barb even though she knows he could cut her to pieces with a word as well as she can. They are both knives, she thinks to herself. Tony is serrated, able to cut and saw through bone and muscle, able to  _ hurt _ . Natasha is sharp; she only needs one slice to kill, her slashes so thin that her victims don’t notice they’re bleeding until they’re dead. Yet, neither of them go for their weapons with each other. She doesn’t know what that means.

 

“Yes.”  _ No.  _

 

He toasts her, raising his glass. “To a hero, then,” he says. “To Natasha Romanov.” She clinks her glass with his. 

 

They lapse into silence. Surprisingly, it is comfortable. Natasha feels no need to fill it, no need to watch and learn like he is a mark. She just lets herself be, lets the Black Widow recede, if only for a moment. 

 

It is dawn by the time they move again. Tony cracks his back, rubs his eyes, forces his masks to bend and fit his new shape. Natasha stands fluidly like a cat, already poised to kill. He takes their glasses to the sink, she folds the blanket that he draped over them at some point during their silent night. All evidence they were ever there is gone. 

 

“Tony,” she calls, before she loses him again, loses this Tony that is real and honest and blunt in a way that Tony Stark could never be.

 

“Yeah, Nat?” he turns where he stands in the door of the elevator. One hand is already on the buttons. 

 

She inhales. Exhales. Looks at him. “You needed the push,” she admits, motioning for JARVIS to close the doors on Tony’s confused expression. 

 

He’ll know what she means, she figures. 

 

(And he does, if the beautifully crafted set of throwing knives on her bed means anything. She smiles, a small thing, as she disables the trackers inlaid in the handles. He can reactivate them remotely, she bets, but it’s the principle of the thing.

 

She packs them with her on her next mission, and isn’t surprised when Iron Man shows up when things go wrong.

 

“Agent Romanov,” he greets, shooting the man holding her with a repulsor. “I was in the neighborhood and figured you could use the assist.”

 

“I was doing fine,” she argues, throwing one of her knives at a fleeing man. 

 

Tony lands and they stand together. She trusts him to watch her back, he trusts her to watch his.

 

She gouges out the trackers later that night and debates throwing them away. In the end, she slots them back into the delicate designs of the handle, but leaves them turned off.)

 

Natasha makes a note to revise her report that very morning.

 

_ Iron Man: yes. Tony Stark: essential. _

 

\---

 

Death is quieter than Natasha imagined it would be. Not that she ever thought about it much, outside of an abstract vision of the hell she believed she deserved. She fell into the trap all of the Avengers did; thinking they were invincible. 

 

But death came for her, on a cliff in Vormir to save the universe. She doesn’t regret her choice, but she doesn’t like the silence, the loneliness. It’s a little chilly; at least hell would have been warm. 

 

She doesn’t know how long she sits alone before someone comes and sits next to her. 

 

“Hey, Itsy Bitsy,” Tony greets, not looking at her. In profile, his right side is burnt and scarred. It looks painful. She wonders if that’s what killed him. 

 

“Stark,” she says neutrally, an attempt to put distance in between them. Her eternal torment, it seems, is to be with a friend she betrayed, who has every reason to hate her. Her punishment is his forgiveness, and she hates it. 

 

“Aw, don’t be like that,” he teases. “Didn’t you miss me?”

 

“Like a virus,” she shoots back on instinct. “Why are you here?”

 

“I’m dead,” he says simply. “Same as you.”

 

“How?”

 

“Squishy humans weren’t meant to wield the Gauntlet, as it turns out.”

 

“ _ Idiot _ ,” Natasha hisses, pulling him into a tight hug. “Just had to be the hero, didn’t you?”

 

“I could say the same to you,” he hugs her back. It has been too long since he held her like this; after she disappeared on him during the Civil War, he put a distance between them. But he has always been too forgiving, and Natasha hates herself for making him forgive her. 

 

“Did we win?” she asks, hoping and praying to a god she hadn’t believed in in lifetimes that their deaths weren’t for nothing. She thinks of a cliff and hopes that it-  _ she _ \- was enough to turn the tide. 

 

Tony smiles wide, stretching the burns and scarring. “We won,” he tells her. 

 

“To a hero, then,” she echoes his words from so long ago, from when they were both younger and stupider and a little less broken. Here in death, at least, they will have time to heal. “To Tony Stark.”

 

“No,” he shakes his head and meets her eyes. “We couldn’t have done it without you, Natasha. Nothing I did, nothing any of us did, would have been possible if not for you. You’re the real hero, Natasha Romanov.”

 

“Natalia,” she chokes out. There is a lump in her throat, unbecoming of a Black Widow. She ignores it and breathes on. “Natalia Alianovna Romanova.”

 

“To a hero,” Tony Stark, Iron Man, Earth’s best defender, repeats. His eyes are soft, his hands rough where he holds hers. “To Natalia Alianovna Romanova.”

 

Natalia closes her eyes. It might be her imagination, but death feels a little warmer than it did before.

**Author's Note:**

> thoughts? comments and kudos are the best things
> 
> hit me up on tumblr @imposter-human


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